Smooth Out These Crumpled Pages
by Quinndolynn
Summary: The sun is strong that day, but they have already proved themselves stronger. AU of less tragedy. Liesel/Rudy


Title: Smooth Out These Crumpled Pages

Summary: This is the story I had to write before I could bring myself to finish the book. AU of less tragedy. Liesel/Rudy

Warnings: Fix-it, pure and simple. Overwrought language and war outcomes in keeping with source material.

Smooth Out These Crumpled Pages

The sunlight that day was a velvet curtain. From far away it was liquid seeming and gracefully draped, up close it was hot and smothering up close, heavy enough to smite a man to the ground. The evidence was there, on the wide lawn, where men sprawled abruptly, as if knocked off balance only the moment before, even though most had not moved throughout the whole long afternoon. They lay in clumps on the sweet grass, forced to struggle up onto their elbows if they wanted a smoke, but for the most part spread-eagled, prone to the sweltering yellows and oranges of heavenly drapery.

The cart rounded the building and the sunlight fell across her face like a blow. The weight of it caught in her eyelashes, dragged her eyes closed. But at the same time, her chin tilted up, turning the blow to a caress by dint of a welcoming angle.

Liesel dismounted from the cart with sunlight still dripping from her chin. She carried a long trail of thefts on her shoulders, but her hands carried a basket of reparations. Carefully she started across the grass, offering men her prickly smile, and their meager choice of reading material, tattered and stained. She knelt by clumps of twos and threes, dry grass itching through her stockings, careful lips stretched over cautious teeth. Most of the men cared more for the sight of a woman than for any words she could offer, and one or two were crafty enough to hold a book in each hand, weighing their respective merits, drawing out the moment of decision so as to also unspool another carefully rationed minute of Liesel's paste and cardboard face.

She left two cover-less magazines with a group of three men and their four hands, and their five feet. For a kindly gentleman with the face and spectacles of a professor she dispensed a thick book of small type that he swore his one remaining eye could manage. For the soldier asleep in the sun, his round pink face slowly coming to a boil between the red-hot handles of his ears, she carefully placed a piratical novel on the seat of his wheelchair.

The books were as precious as any scarce resource, and it pained her to part with them, to pass them to men who might only use their pages to roll their cigarettes, which, like their smokers, were more slender in this time of post-war leanness than the ones she had rolled for her Papa. But she had her own words as comfort, and time and again her hand crept into her pocket to reassure her fingertips of the roughhewn pages concealed there, and the letters and pictures they contained, detailing a bird man's migration and new nesting place across the sea. She sifted Max's words through her head as her hands sorted and rearranged her basket, and because one boy had feathery tufts of hair poking through the bandage embracing his skull, she bestowed on him one of the rare books from her foster mother's own library.

Liesel rose and knelt all around the field, her shadow stretching long behind her, tending to the small plots of misarranged limbs and lonely souls. She planted a handful of printed words here and there, watering a few that looked particularly wilted with the brief cool shower of her hand glancing on an arm of rough brown cloth or shell-shocked knuckles.

And then a longer, thinner shadow arose, assembled stick by stick. An arm, a leg, an implement to lean on, and finally a familiar skull, narrowed by war like the rest of the body.

It was not until the body was upright and balanced, that it spoke, because pride cannot be met lying down, unless the lying has followed a spectacular dive into the mud of Himmel Street, and a goal has been scored or prevented as a result.

The body, assembled and upright, said "Liesel."

A moment before, the hour prior, the many long weeks and months preceding the sunlit field, the body had been dreaming of a ruined street. It was an image born of muttered word passed in muddy darkness, a gasping rumor that had torn out his stomach with as much careless force as any ordinance when it had landed. It was launched from the mud-streaked lips of a companion coming off a shift in the communications hut. A newly-ashen face that had been so cheerful on the first day in the cold grey school, smiling from the neighboring bunk, had appeared crumpled under its load, the body bent as if weighed down by the awful news, which then spilled helpless from the grimy mouth.

The image of the street, a life preserver in the miserable sea that was deployment, tinged golden in memory and stocked with familiar and well-loved characters, instantly fell to ash in the mind's eye.

Even months later, in the warm grass and heavy sun, he still lay mired in that cold sucking mud, and that moment of learning there was no longer home to go to. He pedaled his bicycle down the street, but the tar, softened by bomb-heat, swallowed up the wheels and then his legs. He walked up the path to his own door and opened it onto a mess of fire and smoke within. Outside his mind, his cigarette burnt down to his knuckles, but it wasn't until the ember brushed his skin that he was yanked away from a deep cellar, full of packed bodies and a strong thin voice, slowly filling with cold water and yellow fog.

With a hiss he disposed of the butt, and spat at the burn. Lying back again, he looked once more to the street. But then the air caught and broke around a voice. He was used to the old voices, following everywhere, always in his ears, but this one did not hiss accusation or beg imploringly. This one politely inquired about genre of choice. He forced himself up onto an elbow, squinted, manhandled his eyes with his dusty fingers, squinted again, tried vainly to find an extra ounce of flesh to pinch (he was unsuccessful, his diet had not allowed for the disproving of a miracle.) Another scrub of his eyes and she was still there, a girl, maybe a woman now, in the way that many more girls were women after the end of hostilities. She was silhouetted against the distant brick of the convalescent wing, turned away from him and the strong western sun. But there were two books tucked under her arm, and her posture was that of someone more used to flight at a moment's notice than the slow doling out of goods.

In the ash-coated street of his mind where he had lived ever since that mud-filled night, a tiny, worming tendril of growth broke free, a streak of green amid the grey.

Slowly, he began to raise himself off the ground.

Liesel heard a noise.

But there were many calls, many sighs and whispers, many muffled shouts and grunts, and plaintive requests. There were the silent sounds of smoking and of teeth clenched in pain, and the louder ones of laughter too desperate and forced. But through it came, what sounded like her name, from somewhere beyond her shoulder, quiet, but sure, lit and colored with the twinned angels of hope and fear.

Liesel turned, squinting in the sun and wavering heat haze, her dark German eyes absorbing the rays and reflections in front of her, her brain translating it to impossible image.

A man stood, defying the weight of the sun, and the heavier drag of his fellows' expectant gazes, as one by one they noticed and fell quiet. His shirt blew around his chest, enough space in the fabric for a small windstorm, or another man. His shoulder leaned on a crutch while his body leaned toward the ground as if, only recently risen, it had already enough of being vertical and wished to return. His hair, once lemon, had roughened to gold, and some strands had matured farther, the mud washing off to reveal new grey hairs, that the sun now turned to silver. His whole scalp was in riches, blinding. His face underneath was not to be believed.

Liesel's arm let forth a waterfall of books. They splashed around her feet, churning whitecaps of bright pages, gilded by the sun. The basket rolled and bounced to shore. She took a hesitant step forward, a walker on water, her feet unsure on the slick surface of covers and pages. He matched her wobbly step with one of his own, the crutch advancing, testing the depth of the grass. She passed out of the shallows of spilled pages, and onto the firmness of dry land. His footfall was heavy, but hers came lighter and quicker, and in the time that he managed to advance once more, she had taken the three additional steps and was close enough to touch him.

She did not reach out though, but studied him through the blank margin of air, a strange apparition. She worried that if she dared extend a hand it would vanish, this lifelike shadow of a man, dispersed as easily as smoke or steam, slipping to nothingness like a sliver of soap in a tub of hot washing water. His delay was similar, he worried that if he reached out to her flushed cheek she would blink away, revealed to be a mirage of heat, or worse, deal out a slap and a berating of mistaken identity. His hand probed the air, advancing to the space next to her waist, the vicinity of her cheek, before retreating again. He drew breath, and thought he saw the inhalation stir a curl next to her wide and frightened eyes.

"Liesel," the man said again, with a boy's face, and a boy's voice, and a boy's hope, and this time she was close enough to feel the deep, wondering tones vibrate behind her breastbone, and at the same time, finally, his fingers grazed her wrist. It felt like a burn, a sear of heat and pain, the sun glancing through her pores, rattling in the tiny knitted cells of her stockings, bursting in her ear drums in tiny distant explosions. His face swam in the golden air. "_Mein_ _Gott_, I thought, they said…."

This time Liesel found words to reply. The spell was broken and she reverted to one of her earliest memories of confused love and affection.

"_Saukerl_, _saukerl_, _saukerl!_" She flung the word repeatedly, like she flung her fist at his chest, a push, a release, a reeling back in only to launch it again. His chest was so thin that her curses went straight through him, but his skin was stretched tight over the drum of his ribs, so her fists rebounded, dark with borrowed bruises. A moment stretched, stunned, under the assault, before he caught a blow mid-deliverance. He gripped one wrist, a gesture innate in his fingers, to halt an attack, but more importantly, to drag the neighbor girl away from her madness. His fingers on her wrist had pulled her from a library window, from a sea of Jews, had saved her life in countless other ways, doing up the buttons of a dusty suit and rescuing a book from a freeing river. She swung, captive, furious, and crumpled his chest in her other hand. "_Saukerl_, oh you _arschloch_, oh Rudy, _Rudy_."

"Liesel," he said, like the sun, and held her, too close for anyone to fit a struggle between them. The space between their bodies was too small even for a stick of charcoal, or for a once-glossy magazine page, worn soft. So small a space could only fit words, and those they filled it with, mortaring the bricks of their chests and legs and chins with words. His crutch attained its wish and tilted itself back into the dirt. Now Rudy bent towards her instead, a different, stronger gravity. He held himself upright with hands anchored on her hips, and eyes fastened on her curses that flew buzzing past his ears, and his lips touching her own ear as he poured out his own stream of protestations, a murmuring of reassurance, dark and slow and warm as the Amper on a summer's day. A street destroyed, entirely, and a whole company fell casualty, these were the stories that tumbled past and into each of them, words glancing off each other in their fevered rush, contradictions in rumor and fact snagging and rippling in overlapping tales. Until finally the rush slowed and ceased, and they could only breathe, exhausted, wrapped in each other, sturdy only because they were too preoccupied to notice how precarious they truly were.

Liesel drew back leaving his shirt collar newly wet and dark, and looked up. She pressed experimentally at his sides, as if to see if the hard white keys of his ribcage could yield accordion notes. His hands dared farther, encircling the crutch of her waist, as she combed back his gold and silver hair to find the same familiar creases in his forehead, deepened now under her scrutiny. She felt a halted stumble shiver through him, and acted accordingly, holding him tightly with her eyes, then her arms, and her mouth. She gripped the excess fabric of his shirt in her fists, pulling it tight to prove there was a body underneath. She confused the senses, and saw the dampness of sweat and the coating of grass on the back of his uniform, felt the way his eyes closed under the weight of her gaze, and tasted the space where his pant leg was pinned neatly over the absence of his right leg.

A great cry went up around them, whistles and cheers, and more meaningless words than they could sort through in their lifetime, and only then, reminded of the people around them, the sun weighing them down, and the earth holding them up, did Rudy lose his balance. He tumbled back into the grass, and Liesel followed, bruising her own ribs on his jagged ones, catching the soft _scheisse_ that flew out of his mouth, and kissing it away.

It would be a good end, were it not the only the middling beginning of them. There were still oceans to cross, and graves to visit, medals to win, books to write, canes and crutches to battle with, and great tubs of laundry. There were many kisses to be made up. There were so many thefts yet to come.

It is though a fitting continuation, added to a snowy goalpost dive, and muddy kiss-less slide, leading naturally to the earth once more embracing them and clutching them to its grassy bosom. Let us leave them there, on the hospital lawn, in a sea of books and wounded men, Liesel Meminger the Book Giver, and Rudy Steiner, the man who traded his leg for a kiss, at last.

(AN: Apologies to those who still have me on alert for NCIS – someday I'll write more, but for now I'm poking around other things. Thanks so much for reading!)


End file.
